Ritual and Economy in Metropolitan China

"Ritual and Economy in Metropolitan China is essential background for understanding how traditions modernize within and through global processes. It is essential reading for understanding Shenzhen's emergence as China's fourth city by making salient how South Chinese villagers repurposed family identities and kinship networks to become successful entrepreneurs." - Mary-Ann O’Donnell, co-editor of Learning from Shenzhen: China's Post-Mao Experiment from Special Zone to Model City"

"This is a stimulating study of the cultural underpinnings of urbanisation and economic development in the People’s Republic of China, using the case-example of the southern metropolis Shenzhen. The authors’ unusual combination of economic, sociological and anthropological approaches offers novel perspectives for specialists in all these fields, and for scholars in Chinese Studies more generally." - Philip Clart, Leipzig University

"A great deal of social science scholarship on China gets caught up in a false dichotomy of Chinese exceptionalism vs. ‘Western’ social theory, resulting in studies that focus on either how much China differs from ’the West’ or on how China serves as a site where abstract ‘Western’ theory yields ‘Chinese characteristics’ on the ground. Ritual and Economy in Metropolitan China is one of those rare and rewarding studies that succeeds in transcending this dichotomy by laying the groundwork for a genuine ‘global social science’. Through a rich and highly grounded exploration of ritual practice and the ritual economy in Shenzhen, the authors demonstrate effectively that our taken-for-granted assumptions about social theory can be enriched and broadened by paying some attention to practices in places less heard from in the Western canon. A fascinating account that reaches far beyond the ‘China studies’ field." - Tim Oakes, University of Colorado at Boulder